ARE DEFENDANT CHARACTERISTICS TIPPING THE SCALES OF JUSTICE IN CASES INVOLVING PLEA DEALS? A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

The racially disparate treatment of minority offenders throughout the criminal justice system is well-documented and has gained increasingly widespread attention over the last several decades. There is a large body of scholarship which has sought to explore and identify the various sources of discrimination, and much of this research has been focused on outcomes across two stages of the adjudication process: (1) the initial arrest and charging of offenders, and (2) final sentence outcomes. As a result, comparatively less is known about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities in the steps leading up to an offender’s conviction. This is particularly troubling considering the vast majority of criminal cases are disposed through guilty pleas, and the plea-bargaining process has been shown to play an essential role in shaping sentence outcomes. The present study seeks to make several contributions to the existing literature and poses the following questions: (1) Does the race/ethnicity of the defendant influence the type of plea deal that attorneys believe they can obtain for their clients? (2) Does the gender of the defendant influence the type of plea deal that attorneys believe they can obtain for their clients? (3) Does the influence of defendant characteristics (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender) vary depending on the type of crime the defendant has been charged with? To answer these questions, a sample of currently practicing public defenders working across the state of Virginia were surveyed using factorial vignettes. Findings offer support for commonly used theories of sentencing such as bounded rationality and the focal concerns framework, and further demonstrate the conditional relationship that exists between a defendant’s race/ethnicity and other factors on the decision-making process. Specifically, the results presented here suggest that the type of plea deals attorneys feel they can obtain for their client is dependent not only upon the race/ethnicity of the defendant, but also their gender and the type of offense they have been charged with. The disparate impact of these effects were found to be strongest when examined across decisions related to incarceration length. The following chapters will provide a thorough review of the literature and then detail the research design and methodology of the present study. A discussion of the results will follow, along with the implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.